Not every idea's value is the size of its community though; in fact, most ideas / businesses don't need thousands or millions of users to be profitable or valua

Not every idea's value is the size of its community though; in fact, most ideas / businesses don't need thousands or millions of users to be profitable or valuable. So yes, if you're building a platform of sorts, then by all means skip the monetization part initially. Skipping it though, does mean you incur the risk that you won't be able to monetize properly later on. Simply saying you'll figure out the revenue later on, is a bad excuse for not having a plan in place before.